Washington: Several Indians and Indian- Americans have been indicted on charges of a U-Visa fraud and arranging fake marriages for the purpose of entering the US, authorities said.

Investigating authorities said these people would enter into a fraud marriage with the citizens of the US for the purpose of entering the country and then also fraudulently apply for a special category of U-visa which is normally given to victims of certain crimes who have suffered mental or physical abuse and are helpful to law enforcement.

The indictment alleges that Simpson Lloyd Goodman, a licensed attorney, submitted fraudulent documents to US Citizenship and immigration Services for the purpose of obtaining U-Visas for other co-defendants.

The false documents submitted to USCIS included falsified police reports allegedly prepared by Officer Ivory Lee Harris of the Jackson Police Department. Other defendants engaged in and caused various acts which enabled defendants to attempt to obtain U-Visas from USCIS.

In the 16 count marriage fraud indictment, it is alleged that they would enter into marriages between persons who were already citizens of the US solely for the purpose of obtaining immigration status to which the aliens would not otherwise be entitled.

“These marriages were not entered into because of mutual love and affection between the parties, but solely to create a legal status that would provide a basis for immigration status for the alien partner and usually for some economic benefit to the United States citizen,” the Department of Justice said.

“The defendants allegedly circumvented the laws and submitted fraudulent documents that are critical to obtaining immigration status,” said US Attorney Gregory K Davis.

“These arrests were made as a result of the great work of our law enforcement partners who stopped 19 people who sought to undermine the integrity of our nation’s immigration system,” he said.

The maximum penalties for the crimes charged in the indictments are: conspiracy to commit fraud and misuse of visa permits – five years in prison and USD 250,000 fine per count; fraud and misuse of Visa permits – 10 years in prison and a USD 250,000 fine per count; mail fraud – 20 years in prison and a USD 250,000 fine per count; and wire fraud – 20 years in prison and a USD 250,000 fine.

By most official measures, Latinos in the U.S. are considered to be the fastest-growing demographic. They are also the fastest-growing group of Muslims in America, according to organizations that cater to Hispanics converting to Islam. Although the statistics haven’t been widely tracked, there are an estimated 150,000 Islam converts among the Latino community in the U.S., reported the Press-Enterprise, a California newspaper.

The trend of Hispanic converts to Islam has been tracked by the Islamic Society of North America, which in 2006 estimated there were roughly 40,000 Latino Muslims in the U.S., according to a report by National Public Radio. Some community leaders said the recent growth of the demographic has its roots in a shared experience of immigration and the negative political rhetoric that advocates have deemed as anti-Muslim.

Mark Gonzales, a Muslim poet and artist in California, told the Orange County Register that immigration officials’ targeting of Mexicans and Muslims after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks helped the two demographics find common ground. “Islam is the fastest-growing religion in the world, and Latinos are converting to Islam at a rate higher than any other [ethnicity],” said Gonzalez, who is of Mexican-American and French-American heritage and converted to Islam 12 years ago.

Most Latino Americans belong to the Roman Catholic Church, according to religion data tracked by the Pew Research Center. But the Catholic share of the Latino population has declined, while the number of Latinos who are Protestant or report no religious affiliation has risen.

Jihad Turk, president of Bayan Claremont, an Islamic graduate school in California, told the Press-Enterprise that Islam is most similar to Catholic beliefs. Muslims believe in many stories contained in the Christian Bible, including the prophets, he said.

“Muslims not only believe in God and the Ten Commandments, but also in Jesus as Christ born to the Virgin Mary and her story is told in the Quran in more detail than it’s told in the Bible,” Turk said. Organizations have formed in the U.S. to help the merging of Latino and Muslim communities.

Rida Hamida, president of the Arab American Chamber of Commerce in Orange County, California, has been working with Latino Muslims to highlight the merging of cultures. A series of public events scheduled for next month will focus on a time of Muslim rule in Spain and Portugal, from 711 and 1492, when Muslims, Christians and Jews cohabited along the Iberian Peninsula, Hamida told the Orange County Register.

“I want those organisations that aided Israel to be forced to pay restitutions for victims impacted by their actions,” Abulhawa said.

The lawsuit claims non-profit groups directly contributed to violations of US law and international law, subverted US foreign policy, and contributed to countless crimes and human rights abuses targeting Palestinians.

“For 30 years at least, the US taxpayer has been funding and/or subsidising criminal activities overseas, ie murder, arson, malicious property destruction, assault and battery and ethnic cleansing and international terrorist acts,” it said.

The attorney for the plaintiffs, Martin F McMahon, said the US Department of Treasury should not just end the tax exemption, but should also recoup hundreds of millions of dollars in back taxes.

The lawsuit said: “These charities’ agenda is to rid the West Bank and EJ [East Jerusalem] of all non-Jews, consistent with perceived biblical imperatives. They have been very successful in that endeavour, as detailed herein, primarily because of the Treasury’s abject and long-standing failure to monitor and prevent their criminal activities for at least the last 30 years.”

McMahon said his law firm was working pro bono and is looking for other plaintiffs to join the lawsuit.

The lawsuit names groups including the Falic Family Foundation, FIDF (Friends of the Israeli Defence Force), American Friends of Ariel, Gush Etzion Foundation, American Friends of Har Homa, and Hebron Fund.

The Treasury Department has 60 days to respond to the lawsuit.

“This [Obama] administration, like every administration before it since 1967, views settlement activity as illegitimate and counterproductive to the cause of peace,” the US State Department told Al Jazeera in an email.

“The United States has never defended or supported settlements and activity associated with them and, by extension, does not pursue policies that would legitimise them.”

The largest Muslim advocacy group in the United States has raised concerns of a backlash following the deadly California shooting with reports of a threat of violence received at one mosque and many hate calls.

Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) in Washington DC, on Thursday condemned the killing of at least 14 people in San Bernardino, while pleading “to not generalise from the acts of individuals to an entire faith community”.

US authorities said they were still investigating the motive behind the shooting spree, allegedly carried out by the suspects Syed Farook, 28, and his wife Tashfeen Malik, 27. Reports said they were heavily armed with guns, bombs and ammunition.

Following the shooting, the New York Post – the Rupert Murdoch-owned tabloid newspaper – ran a banner headline calling the two dead suspects “MUSLIM KILLERS”. The paper later changed the headline.

“It’s completely outrageous that the New York Post would use that front-page headline,” Hooper told Al Jazeera.

He called the newspaper “irresponsible”, but added he was not surprised because “it is known for its anti-Muslim bigotry”.

“It’s inflammatory and we believe it incites hatred against all Muslims, not just against the people who allegedly carried out the San Bernardino attacks.”

Phone threats

As the names of the suspects were reported on Wednesday, the Manassas Mosque in Virginia received a voice message from an anonymous male caller threatening he would do to worshippers at the mosque what had been done to the victims in San Bernardino.

Nahedian said he reported the incident to police, who were investigating the call along with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).

Nahedian has been preaching at the mosque for more than 20 years, he said. In 2014, the Manassas Mosque was also vandalised.

He blamed a lack of education and awareness about Islam on the threats, saying educated people “know that we [Muslims] are the also victims” of violence.

Nahedian said worshippers at the mosque had been subjected to verbal abuse and other threats even before the San Bernardino attack had happened.

“This is part of our life anyway,” he said. “But we always teach the congregation to be kind to people, and to let your action be the defender of your faith.”

Spewing hatred

At CAIR’s heaquarters in the US capital, Hooper reported that he and his staff had received “lots and lots of hate messages” on Thursday.

“Most of them are just spewing hatred against Islam and Muslims, which is not illegal,” Hooper said.

In California, where the shooting happened, Ojaala Ahmad, spokesman of the state’s CAIR office, said Muslim Americans were as “heartbroken” about what happened as the rest of the country.

She admitted that she also became worried after hearing the identities of the attackers.

“I think it has become very common now that every time a Muslim person might be the perpetrator, the public and the media are quick to say that this was an act of terror without investigating what the actual motives were,” Ahmad said.

But in California anti-Islam sentiment “is not that blatant” as in other states, said Ahmad, and the Muslim community received “overwhelming support” from inter-faith advocates.

“They are saying that they support us and that they know that Islam is not a bad religion, and for us to stay strong in times of what we might be facing in the coming days with the anti-Muslim climate,” Ahmad said.

US authorities are investigating the motive behind a shooting spree that left 14 people dead and another 17 wounded at a social services centre hosting a Christmas party in Southern California.

A man and a woman suspected of taking part in Wednesday’s attack in San Bernardino died in a shoot-out with police hours later, authorities said.

The slain suspects were identified by police as Syed Farook, 28, and Tashfeen Malik, 27, were described as a couple.

Jarrod Burguan, San Bernardino police chief, said US-born Farook had attended a holiday banquet for employees of the local public health department, and later returned to open fire on the celebration.

The attackers were dressed in military-style gear and carried assault weapons as they burst into the auditorium where the shooting took place, at the campus of a social-services agency.

The couple were dressed in assault-style clothing and also placed several bombs at various locations, which police detonated. Beyond the 14 dead, the shooting left at least 17 people wounded, including 10 in critical condition.

No details have yet been released on the victims’ identities.

House-to-house search

Police were conducting a house-to-house search in the area where the third suspect was apprehended and completed the search early in the evening, when the “shelter-in-place” warning to residents was lifted, according to police.

“This is the first time we’ve seen it like this, on lockdown,” Hector Guerrero, husband of an employee who works in the facility, told Al Jazeera.

“I don’t think anything like this has happened in the Inland Empire,” he said, referring to the area east of Los Angeles.

Farook’s brother-in-law has said he was stunned to hear of his relative’s involvement in Wednesday’s shooting.

Farhan Khan, who is married to the sister of Syed Farook, made the comments at the Anaheim office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

Khan, who said he last spoke to Farook about a week ago, said he had “absolutely no idea why [Farook] would do this. I am shocked myself”.

The latest killings are likely to fuel to an ongoing debate about the definition of “terror attacks” in the US and what role the ethnicity of perpetrators play in media coverage of gun violence.

Al Jazeera’s Rob Reynolds, reporting from San Bernardino, said: “The nomenclature is very troubling in the US. What defines terrorism? Is it simply someone with a political motive, is it someone who kills a number of people for motives that are unknown? School shootings, work place shootings – these things happen all the time in the US.”

President Barack Obama, who just last week made a plea for tougher gun-control measures after three people were killed at a family-planning centre in Colorado, again urged Congress to take action.

In October, an armed man killed nine people at a college in Oregon, and in June, a white attacker killed nine black churchgoers in South Carolina.

‘Pattern of mass shootings’

“The one thing we do know is that we have a pattern now of mass shootings in this country that has no parallel anywhere else in the world,” Obama told CBS News.

“There are some steps we could take, not to eliminate every one of these mass shootings, but to improve the odds that they don’t happen as frequently.”

Wednesday’s attack marked the deadliest gun violence in the country since the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in December 2012, in which 27 people, including the shooter, were killed.

So far in 2015, there have been more than 350 shootings in which four or more people have been wounded, according to the crowd-sourced website shootingtracker.com, which keeps a running tally of US gun violence.

The 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq fueled the creation of the Islamic State (ISIS) today and must serve as a warning against similar rash military intervention in Syria, a former U.S. intelligence chief said in an interview with German media on Sunday.

“When 9/11 occurred, all the emotions took over, and our response was, ‘Where did those bastards come from? Let’s go kill them. Let’s go get them.’ Instead of asking why they attacked us, we asked where they came from,” former U.S. special forces chief Mike Flynn, who also served as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), told Der Spiegel. “Then we strategically marched in the wrong direction.”

In recent weeks, ISIS has claimed responsibility for attacks in Lebanon andParis and the bombing of a Russian airplane over the Sinai peninsula, which together killed hundreds of people. Following the attacks, French President François Hollande vowed a “merciless” response against the group in Syria and Iraq—a statement that prompted comparisons between Hollande and former U.S. President George W. Bush in the wake of 9/11.

Echoing long-held arguments made by other experts, Flynn said Sunday that increased airstrikes and other offensives could be seen as an attempt to “invade or even own Syria,” and that the fight against militant groups like ISIS will only succeed or make progress through collaborative efforts with both Western and Arab nations. “Our message must be that we want to help and that we will leave once the problems have been solved. The Arab nations must be on our side.”

Otherwise, the U.S. is poised to repeat all its past mistakes, he said.

Der Spiegel‘s Matthias Gebauer and Holger Stark noted that in February 2004, the U.S. military “already had [ISIS leader] Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in your hands—he was imprisoned in a military camp, but got cleared later as harmless by a U.S. military commission. How could that fatal mistake happen?”

Flynn replied:

We were too dumb. We didn’t understand who we had there at that moment.

[….] First we went to Afghanistan, where al-Qaida was based. Then we went into Iraq. Instead of asking ourselves why the phenomenon of terror occurred, we were looking for locations. This is a major lesson we must learn in order not to make the same mistakes again.

“It was a huge error,” Flynn said. “As brutal as Saddam Hussein was, it was a mistake to just eliminate him. The same is true for Moammar Gadhafi and for Libya, which is now a failed state. The historic lesson is that it was a strategic failure to go into Iraq. History will not be and should not be kind with that decision.”

Flynn’s interview with Der Spiegel echoes comments he made to Al Jazeera‘s Mehdi Hasan in August that the U.S. “totally blew it” in preventing the caliphate’s rise “in the very beginning.”

In fact, Flynn said, the U.S. deliberately backed extremist groups within the Syrian rebel movement as far back as 2012, when he was still DIA head. The Obama administration was aware at the time of a recently-declassified DIA memo that predicted the rise of a militant group in eastern Syria. Supporting the insurgency was a “willful decision,” he said.

At least 3,952 people have been killed in the US-led coalition’s campaign against the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) group in Syria, according to a monitoring group.

The UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) said on Monday the death toll included a total of 250 civilians.

The air strikes occurred in the period between September 2014 and November 23, 2015, SOHR said.

The US announced the formation of the coalition against ISIL in Syria and Iraq in September 2014 which then included 28 countries. It now includes 65 countries.

Among those killed were 66 children below the age of eight, and 44 children above the age of 18.

At least 3,547 ISIL fighters were killed in air strikes on Hama, Aleppo, Homs, Hasaka, Raqqa and Deir Az Zor.

The air strikes also killed 136 al-Nusra Front fighters.

CENTCOM response

The US Combined Joint Task Force’s Public Affairs desk told Al Jazeera the US Central Command (CENTCOM) takes all allegations of civilian casualties seriously and applies standards in its targeting process to avoid or to minimise civilian casualties.

“We take all allegations of civilian casualties seriously, and we apply very rigorous standards in our targeting process to avoid or to minimise civilian casualties in the first place,” a CENTCOM media officer said.

“We take great care – from analysis of available intelligence to selection of the appropriate weapon to meet mission requirements – in order to minimise the risk of collateral damage, particularly any potential harm to non-combatants.

“One completed investigation into two allegations surrounding a November 5, 2014, air strike in Harim City, Syria was released May 21 and found, based on the preponderance of evidence, that two non-combatant children were likely killed from a US air strike.

“We receive and review all allegations of civilian casualties no matter the source of the information,” they said.

When asked about ISIL casualties, CENTCOM said it does not release the number of ISIL fighters killed.

“As of November 13, the coalition has damaged or destroyed 16,075 targets.”

The coalition is also involved in providing military support to their partners in Syria and Iraq, in addition to humanitarian assistance to those affected by the conflict.

“Not much is bipartisan these days, but apparently bigotry is something both sides of the aisle can come together on.”

“Speaker Ryan and this un-American bill’s supporters falsely claim it will simply pause U.S. resettlement of refugees,” said Karin Johanson of the ACLU. “In fact, it will bring resettlement of Syrian and Iraqi refugees to a grinding halt” (Photo: Reuters)

Forty-seven House Democrats joined with a majority of Republicans to approve a bill that would effectively stop the ability for Syrian refugees attempting to flee their war-torn country to be resettled in the United States.

The passage of the bill, which was backed by newly-elected Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and passed 289-137, was immediately slammed by progressive lawmakers who opposed the measure and rights groups who said the bill represents a gross and reactionary response to recent events in Paris, France.

Reps. Raúl M. Grijalva (D-Ariz.) and Keith Ellison (D-Minn.), who co-chair the Congressional Progressive Caucus, called the bill a direct assault on “a fundamental American value” which is to “provide a safe haven for our most vulnerable neighbors.”

Grijalva and Ellison said they were proud to oppose the bill which they characterized as a repetition of a past mistakes that have tarnished American history. “Syrian refugees are fleeing persecution and violence from the very same terrorists that attacked Paris last week,” they said. “We cannot allow fear-mongering to influence policy that could mean the difference between life and death for these desperate families.” We stand proudly against misguided attempts to repeat past mistakes that tarnish our nation’s history.

The bill, they said, “diverts resources from where they are really needed by creating an excessive review process that would add years to the resettlement process and prevent thousands of people from getting the protection they need. Our Syrian refugee vetting process is already the most comprehensive in the world, and these changes would stretch the federal government’s limited resources. Closing our doors to Syrian refugees fleeing violence and persecution isn’t just morally wrong; it threatens our national security by fueling the extremist narrative that the West is at war with Islam.”

Though many Democrats sided with President Obama, who has said he will veto the bill, the 47 Democrats who sided with their GOP colleagues exposed just how susceptible lawmakers remain when it comes to knee-jerk jingoism and the hysteria that follows attacks like the ones in Paris on Friday.

As Nick Cunningham, an independent journalist and writer, responded to the vote on Twitter: “Not much is bipartisan these days, but apparently bigotry is something both sides of the aisle can come together on.”

Obama has been heavily critical of efforts to limit refugee resettlement, although he and other administration officials said they are open to ideas to strengthen the screening process. He has said he remains committed to his previous plan to admit 10,000 Syrians in the 2016 fiscal year, as long as they go through the screening process.

He said the rhetoric coming from Republicans — and some Democrats — would only hurt the country’s security.

“I cannot think of a more potent recruitment tool for ISIL than some of the rhetoric that’s been coming out of here during the course of this debate,” Obamasaid Tuesday.

“Speaker Ryan and this un-American bill’s supporters falsely claim it will simply pause U.S. resettlement of refugees,” said Karin Johanson, director of the ACLU’s Washington legislative office. “In fact, it will bring resettlement of Syrian and Iraqi refugees to a grinding halt by adding layers of bureaucracy to an already rigorous process.”

What’s more, she continued, “[i]t also discriminates against refugees based on their national origin, nationality, and religion. Supporters of this bill want us to turn our backs on refugees who are seeking safe harbor from the very terrorism we all abhor. This is not leadership. We thank the House members who rejected this reactionary impulse and this discriminatory legislation.”

When asked about the bill’s prospects in the U.S. Senate by a reporter, Democratic Minority Leader Harry Reid (Nev.) responded: “Don’t worry, it won’t get passed.” Meanwhile, attempts from Republican presidential candidates Ted Cruz and Rand Paul to block or curtail benefits for Syrian refugees seeking to enter the U.S. failed in the Senate on Thursday.